The Macmillan homestead was a very humble old cottage located half-way between Corrie and the top of Goat Fell Mountain, the highest point on the island of Arran. An old crofter and his wife lived there, leading one of the most frugal existences that I had ever seen anywhere. They were willing to furnish me with lodging and simple breakfast, consisting of tea and oatmeal porridge with some bread covered with a thin layer of American lard. I did not object; I was prepared to take up low living and high thinking for the love of Michael Faraday. Communion with Faraday from early morning until four in the afternoon, and after that any play that came along, with plenty of dancing in the evening, was a splendid combination. Practically one solid meal a day, my dinner at the Corrie inn, supplied the fuel for all this activity, and it did it satisfactorily. How could I complain? The man whose wonderful scientific discoveries I was absorbing each day started life as a bookbinder’s apprentice, and the founder of the great Macmillan publishing-house was born and passed his boyhood days in the humble cottage where I was lodging. I was sure that in their youth they never had more than one solid meal a day and they prospered. My rapid absorption and digestion of the mental food which Faraday offered I attributed to my avoidance of superfluous physical food, but I must confess that I was quite hungry when dinner was served at the Corrie inn, and I enjoyed it immensely. I never understood the full meaning of low living and high thinking as well as I did while I was a lodger at the Macmillan homestead. My thinking machinery, I thought, never worked better, and even my vision, always very good, seemed to be better than ever before. On exceptionally clear days I was sure that from the high elevation of the Macmillan cottage, on the slope of Goat Fell Mountain, I could see the beautiful Firth of Clyde as far as Greenock and Paisley, and at times even the gray and gloomy edifices of Glasgow seemed to loom up in the distance. I bragged about it, but my friends at Corrie met my bragging by informing me, jokingly, that any Scotchman can see much farther than that. One of them, a pupil of Sir William Thomson at the University of Glasgow, met my bragging by the epigrammatic question: “Can you see in Faraday as far as Maxwell, the Scotchman, saw?” I never bragged again about my vision while I was in Scotland. I was certain, however, that from the Macmillan homestead on the slopes of Goat Fell Mountain I obtained a deeper view into Faraday’s discoveries than I could have obtained in any other place. I seldom mention the names of Faraday and Maxwell without recalling to memory the beautiful island of Arran and the humble Macmillan homestead on Goat Fell Mountain. VIII STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN